updated 06:05 pm EDT, Thu August 29, 2013

The oft-delayed Sim City for Macintosh has finally launched and in a development that is likely no surprise to anyone -- given the game's launch history -- is riddled with bugs. The EA forums are seeing a wide range of complaints from OS X gamers ranging from a complete inability to install the game, graphical corruption, failure to launch in full-screen mode, and random window resizing. So far, Electronic Arts has no official comments on the Macintosh launch.

The issues manifest themselves on the entire range of hardware capable of running the demanding game, and bear no resemblance to launch issues on the PC, which were generally related to authentication servers being overloaded and game feature rollback. Users are reporting the Macintosh client reporting that it cannot handle the graphics, despite the user having been playing it under windows in a Bootcamp partition. Even at minimum resolution, a 2012-era MacBook Pro barely works at 1024x768 resolution with minimum detail.

Other users claim to have deleted and reinstalled EA's digital distribution system Origin multiple times, with no installation success whatsoever. Complaints on the forums cite a general lack of user support from the company.

The PC launch was marred with technical issues as well, but it was hoped that the extended development time and claims of a "no compromises" port of the game would help. Most of the Windows issues with the game have been ironed out, leaving users with the hope that the Macintosh version of the game would be less bug-riddled than the first release, but this has proven to not be the case.

I have to say that the front-page graphic to go with this story (a SimCity in flames) is completely awesome.

Also: "The PC launch was marred with technical issues..." That's a bit of an understatement for a game launch that was such a technical disaster that it was literally unplayable by a lot of people, ate the saves of others, the company had to disable features, give away free A-list games as an apology, stopped advertising it for a while, had Amazon pull it from sale, and had reviewers literally downgrade their scores from near-perfect to moderately awful after launch.